Monday, May 17, 2004

A small bomb exploded containing some sarin nerve agent, but the bomb was apparently a dud. There was only some minor exposure to a few people. Besides that, there's this aspect, which would be funny if only it weren't real life:

Former U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix, speaking to the Associated Press in Sweden, said the shell was likely a stray weapon scavenged from a dump and did not signify that Iraq had large stockpiles of such weapons. Kimmitt said he believed that insurgents who planted the explosive didn't know it contained the nerve agent.

...Many of the materials used for roadside bombs are believed to have been looted from arsenals after the collapse of the regime in April 2003.

More proof of the ineptitude of our post-war plan. Ummm, if we supposedly knew exactly where all the arsenals were (struggle with me to bring up the dim memory of Colin Powell holding up black-and-white photos in front of the UN, if that memory hasn't been erased by months of doublethink,) then why didn't we guard them?

The insurgents who planted the device didn't know it had nerve agent in it? If Bush was right about Saddam's arsenals, then who knows what we've given the insurgents access to.

Then again, Hans Blix seems to believe this isolated weapon was merely a fluke.

He said it was likely the sarin gas used could have been from a leftover shell found in a chemical dump.

"It doesn't sound absurd at all. There can be debris from the past and that's a very different thing from have stocks and supplies," he said. "I think we need to know more about it."

I think that's fairly probable. I'm sure if you looked in enough places here in the United States you could find scary abandoned piles of who-knows-what, let alone in a place like Iraq that I'm sure doesn't have all sorts of environmental regulations that require them to dump chemicals in a particular way.

Honestly, I don't see how this is any sort of a victory for those who support the war. It seems to only show how the situation has gotten out of our ability to control.